John Haffenden, editor
SELECTED LETTERS OF WILLIAM EMPSON
729pp. Oxford University Press. £40 (US $74).
0 19 928684 1
"Personally I am attracted by the notion of a hearty indifference to one’s own and other people’s feelings, when a fragment of the truth is in question . . . ." We normally think of letters as a medium more hospitable to considerations about feelings, one’s own and other people’s, than most of the more public or impersonal genres. But in making this feisty declaration, the literary critic William Empson was being true to his nature as a correspondent as well as a controversialist. Indeed, for Empson (at least as represented by this sumptuous selection) these two roles were frequently hard to distinguish.
This is not just because many of his letters take up literary-critical disputes with friends and colleagues, turning them into opponents for the duration of the (often remarkably long) wrangling epistle some must have been taken aback to receive. The overlap also works in, as it were, the other direction: wrangling was a form of sociability for the sociable but sometimes rather isolated Empson. As he put it in an early essay (quoted in John Haffenden’s deft introduction): “Our whole mental life is based on being social animals. Of course the man may quarrel with his company when he gets it, and feel pleased about that, but what he chiefly needed was the company”. Empson was apparently good company in person, especially if one had a robust capacity for alcohol (he regarded a good party as “one of the keenest pleasures in life”), but it clearly took robustness of other kinds to sustain any kind of friendship with him through letters. It was a characteristic touch of off-hand realism, in the passage just quoted, to throw in “and feel pleased about that”. But it was self-knowledge too: Empson did appear to relish the quarrelling and this raises questions about his persuasiveness not just as a correspondent, but more generally as a critic.
Empson famously characterized much of what went on in writing as “argufying”, which he glossed as “the kind of arguing we do in ordinary life, usually to get our own way; I do not mean nagging by it, but just a not specially dignified sort of arguing”. He was attractively alert to the combative aspects of this activity: “Argufying is not only mental; it also feels muscular. Saying ‘therefore’ is like giving the reader a bang on the nose”. There is, one way and another, quite a lot of pugilism in Empson’s writing. He liked his prose pieces to have “a bang at the end”, and someone else’s nose was often as handy a place as any for these to land. As an undergraduate literary magazine editor, even before he had fatefully changed from mathematics to English, he welcomed a contribution which would disagree with the views of his future supervisor partly because “it would be rather a smack at Richards”. One of his best-known bits of fraternal joshing in poetry is entitled “Just a Smack at Auden”. In wrangling about the Elizabethan theatre he is pleased to note that he lands a good few “whacks at Wickham” (Glynne Wickham’s was the nose in question). His most frequent punchbag was his typewriter. “I smack this out in a state of moderate beer”, he declares in a letter to Charles Madge, ostensibly to soften the force of some awesomely frank criticism of the latter’s typescript. “I am smacking out my silly Inaugural on the typewriter”, he announces almost two decades later, again turning to the colloquial register to undercut the inherent pomposity and absurdity, as it pleased him to make out, of such professorial pronouncements.
He liked his antagonists to fight back: that made them better company, for the most part. Like the hard-riding, hard-drinking squires from whom he descended (and whom he still in some ways resembled), he admired “spirit”. He sought a further reference on a student he had turned down for graduate work largely because “the fighting reply of Mr Trotter to my letter of rejection has made me think better of him”. Deploring the apolitical character of Anglo-American literary criticism on his return to Britain in 1952 after five years in China, he mocked the new academic decorum: “I hope there isn’t a new rule in the game, so that politics mustn’t be mentioned when one is playing literary criticism; that would sound to me like funk”. There are quite a few moments when Empson can sound like a character out of Tom Brown’s Schooldays: it takes all the fun out of the game if you can’t kick your opponents or they don’t kick back.
Even those who wrote in his praise come in for a spot of biffing. One correspondent is thanked, after five pages of vigorous correction, for his “sympathy and sensitivity” towards Empson’s poetry, “apart from the appalling effects of your being systematically deluded at the taxpayer’s expense”. The American critic Roger Sale, having sent Empson a copy of his Modern Heroism, still one of the most appreciative and even moving appraisals of Empson’s criticism, was greeted with: “You will not be surprised if I try to answer your attacks on me rather than return thanks for your praise”. Sale may or may not have been surprised, but he surely had the right to be a tad disappointed. Even Christopher Ricks, Empson’s most brilliant champion and already by 1971 a friend, came in for a public wigging, followed up by the kind of letter that only Empson could think compatible with the “affection” he professed for the younger man (“your answer . . . is worse than the review, because it seems incapable of understanding the matter”). For the most part, this volume only gives Empson’s side of any correspondence, but Haffenden’s tactful editing extends to the occasional inclusion in extended headnotes of relevant passages from incoming letters, and in this case he prints Ricks’s concluding letter in full, an impressively dignified and stout-hearted vindication in which both sorrow and anger have their due place and through which affection is not allowed to become a victim of the shrapnel.
For the most part, Empson seemed only half aware of just how offensive he was being, and only half to care. Even when he did care, he would keep gnawing at the bone. T. S. Eliot, as publisher of his poetry, was the recipient of a breath-takingly sharp complaint about his failure to promote Empson’s last book of verse. Clearly ruffled, Eliot replied that Empson’s was “the most insulting letter which I have ever received”, and rather pompously requested Empson only to communicate with him via a third party in future. Empson, “shocked by your reply, which I had no idea that I deserved”, hastens to make amends, but even as he offers his hand it clenches in the old reflex (“I was simply complaining that you had let the thing get into a muddle”; “it seems to me quite obvious that you are an enormously better poet than I am; but it is very bad for a great writer to refuse to be treated like other people”, and so on). At least in this case the exchange was brief and the practical matter soon resolved. Where “a fragment of the truth” was in question, in some literary-critical dispute, the later Empson’s desire not to let go of his point could verge on the obsessive, and one or two of the recipients might be forgiven for feeling that it was hard to determine where his much-celebrated “bracing sanity” ended and the green ink began.
And this is where this divertingly rich hoard of Empson prose starts to raise doubts, not about his brilliance as a critic, which could never be in question, but about his persuasiveness. (Haffenden has by now rendered so many services to Empson’s posthumous reputation, editing several of his unfinished works as well as writing the biography, that it almost goes without saying that this edition is authoritative, impeccable and very usable.) Haffenden rightly observes that Empson “loved the disarming kick of informality” in his prose, but reading him in bulk one begins to wonder whether it really does “disarm”. It is true that it seems to puncture any tendency to pomposity on his own part, but it can, in context, simultaneously have the opposite effect: by staking a claim to see through all forms of cant and to have a securer hold on the fundamentals of life, it puts everyone else in their place. Patrician demotic, one of Empson’s favoured registers, can be an attractively deflationary mode, but it can also be condescending or superior in the way it pooh-poohs the earnest pettinesses with which we mostly prop ourselves up. When this was combined with that “hearty indifference to other people’s feelings” which this otherwise warmhearted man allowed himself once he unsheathed his sword, he became as likely to provoke resistance as agreement. One cannot help wondering whether the critic who exhibited an unparalleled sensitivity to nuances of tone in literature can really have been unaware of the effect of some of his own preferred tones.
This becomes more of an issue in his later letters, as indeed it did in his later published criticism, notoriously so in the case of his unrelenting forensic indictment of Christianity in Milton’s God, published in 1961. In the 1930s, Empson’s writing, both public and private, seemed more marked by a sunny acceptingness, a placid accommodation to life and its rum goings-on, which provided a winning accompaniment to his dazzling critical solos. This strain seems less in evidence by the 1950s and 60s; he becomes less winning and more concerned to win.
It should be said that this picture may partly be an optical illusion created by the nature of the book under review, and this for three reasons. First, this volume, substantial though it is, contains only a selection of the surviving letters, and for understandable reasons the emphasis has clearly been placed on letters that continue or elucidate Empson’s critical engagements. One assumes there are more personal letters where the sheer attractiveness and charm of his company are more in evidence. There is, for example, very little here about his colourful wife, Hetta (“a tall blonde Boer”) and that mostly off-hand (“Hetta likes Mongols”, accounting for her absence in the interior of China). There are no letters to Alice Stewart, perhaps one of the closest companions of his later years. Second, because this selection is appearing, a little oddly, between what one assumes will be the two volumes of Haffenden’s hugely thorough biography (the first instalment, Among the Mandarins, which covers the years up to 1940, was reviewed in the TLS on July 1, 2005), we at the moment know a lot more about the younger than the older Empson, and this weight of biographical detail inevitably draws us into sympathizing with his plights and making allowances for his mistakes, whereas the later letters do not yet benefit from this process. And third, the distribution of the letters selected for inclusion tilts the picture heavily towards the latter years. Over half of this volume is devoted to letters from the 1960s and 70s (from his mid-fifties to his mid-seventies) and these do not appear to have been the years when his writing was at its most engaging or his biography at its most intriguing.
There are some wonderful letters from the 1930s, generously though not exhaustively quoted in Among the Mandarins, but there are disappointingly few from the 1940s, the key decade which saw the brilliant, itinerant young critic marry, become a father, and take up the civic burdens of patriotism, as well as finishing the most substantial statement of Empsonian criticism, The Structure of Complex Words, which was finally published in 1951. Following his return from his second stint in China, Empson became Professor of English at Sheffield in 1953, with the more or less inevitable result that there is a higher quotient of dreariness and exasperation in his correspondence from then on. There are still delicious and stirring things in his later letters, but there is an understandable decline in the quality of amused chirpiness that breaks through even the most impersonal of the earlier ones. The biffing starts to seem more relentless than playful. Bystanders might well have thought it the better part of valour not to take him on in the correspondence columns of the literary periodicals.
One reason why so little strain is involved in treating many of Empson’s letters as extensions of his literary criticism is because as a critic he always wrote with a sense of his audience and where he had got to in an extended conversation with them. This, rather than any scientific “methodology” governed his critical conduct: “It is a delusion for the critic to think he can cover a subject completely; he is always talking to an audience who know quite a lot but may not know the small extra thing he is saying, and a later audience may always disagree”. He liked to maintain that he wrote for “the ordinary tolerably informed reader”, and although in the postwar years there was an element of bluff about this (he must have known that his contributions to Essays in Criticism or The Kenyon Review were mostly, though not exclusively, being read by other critics and scholars), it still constituted an admirable regulative ideal for the purposes of avoiding obscurity and clique-speak.
It is hardly surprising that two of the most trenchant letters included here (and trenchancy was not a quality in short supply in Empson’s correspondence) directly addressed the question of the relation between critic and publics. The first is the 1937 letter to Charles Madge already referred to (quoted in extenso in the first volume of Haffenden’s biography), where he argues vigorously that “the point about writing as plainly as you can is that you are testing your ideas against somebody who is not a specialist and just knows about life in general”. The second is a bristling reply to Boris Ford in 1959 on the question of what kinds of day job writers should have and, in particular, whether trying to remain some kind of freelance was better than becoming an academic. Empson conceded this might be the case with poets (although as he modestly reflected: “Minor poets such as myself need not I think regard it as very dreadful to stop writing poetry in middle age”), but the case was different with literary criticism:
This has become a much more powerful and interesting tool since about 1900, and many of the able literary young want to go in for it. They can I think certainly do it quite as well while employed as dons, though they should be warned against insisting they must be Professors, a capacity in which they are liable to get heavy extra chores [Amen to that] . . . . I do not know how a literary critic could be in such close contact with the existing audience reaction anywhere else; he certainly won’t do it by writing journalism in obedience to the hunch of an editor . . . . You must remember that, if a young critic makes the great renunciation, saying “It is beneath me to read all these horrid essays”, the next thing he will have to do is turn out a lot of shockingly coarse hack-work, which really is beneath him and will remain permanently in print to shame his later years. A university job does at least mean that you are free to print in a decently considered manner.
That tone of “sturdy good sense”, which Empson so prized in others, is again prominent here, applied to a topic close to home. It is a pity – indeed, it may be thought a spiteful whim of that kind of sadistic God against whom Empson constantly inveighed – that his death in 1984 deprived us of the surely succulent delights of reading Empson on the Research Assessment Exercise.
Nonetheless, despite his lively sense of addressing an audience in both public and private forms of writing, Empson’s manner could be counterproductive, again especially in his later years. “Some of the recent reviews of my work have wondered why I am so facetious, making it impossible to take what I say seriously”, he lamented to his younger colleague, Roma Gill, in 1979. His revealing defence was that “I can’t bear to print a thing till I can read it over without feeling bored; if it feels boring, that proves it is wrong”. Boredom may have been a larger existential problem for Empson, as for many mathematicians; he may partly have been impelled into his characteristic focus on ambiguity in his early career because this simply made literature more interesting. But here it is a matter of not finding his own writing boring, and as a defence it rings rather hollow. He clearly registers that his recent writing, at least, is not achieving its intended effect, and he has more than an inkling of how his own tone contributes to this failure. Yet there’s a shrug of je m’en foutisme about his response: the whole activity would just become unbearably tiresome if he had to give up his favourite forms of intellectual self-stimulation, even though he knows these do not help gain acceptance for what he writes.
Another aspect of Empson’s somewhat chequered relations with his readers Comes to light when we consider how far and in what ways he chose to play any kind of public role. There was, of course, a kind of politics involved in continuing to try to write for a non-specialized readership, and his sustained campaign against what he saw as the bizarre and barbaric superstitions of Christianity went well beyond the usual confines of literary criticism. Yet in comparison with several of his relevant contemporaries, he largely abstained from the role of the commentator on society and politics. We get some insight into the intellectual and temperamental complexities at work in this unusual mix in a letter from July 1940. Empson believed it was his duty to get back to Britain to help in whatever way he could in the fight against Hitler (he was to spend most of the war organizing BBC broadcasting to China), but he wrote in some agitation to one correspondent asking that he not publish the preceding letter in which Empson had set out his sense of obligation. “It’s all right for me to say ‘this is the proper place to be’ in a private letter, where I am talking about myself, but as soon as I have it published I am obviously hinting about other people, and I want to avoid that.” (He may well have been thinking of high-profile literary expatriates such as Isherwood and Auden, whom he had visited in New York on his way back to Britain.) He went on: “This anxiety not to tell anybody what to do or what they ought to have done isn’t altogether a good thing no doubt, the ‘flight from leadership’, but in the present case it’s surely only right”. This union of a strong sense of personal obligation with an unwillingness to tell others what they ought to do suggests that strain in Empson that seemed to owe more to the clipped Englishness of his forebears than to the habitual behaviour of the literary intellectuals among whom he mostly moved.
But this did not mean that Empson was apolitical or lacking in partisan convictions. It is interesting to find him, in a letter to Ricks, thanking him for his contribution to the Festschrift for Empson, emphasizing this as a difference between them: “I had already thought it a gap, a limitation in your mind that you cannot imagine a man taking a real interest in public affairs” (this in a letter of “thanks”, remember). Empson did take such an interest, but the interest was often expressed a little obliquely, as it was in his poetry in the late 1930s warning about “the gathering storm” (a title he half-joked, half-believed Churchill pinched from him). When asked, he declared his opposition to America’s war in Vietnam in forthright terms, though by and large he didn’t use his cultural standing to write about such matters in the general press. One index of his sound political instincts was the way he got Encounter’s number from the start: as he remarked in 1967, “Ever since Encounter was founded, I have noticed that its political contributors have great difficulty in opening their mouths without a lie hopping out”. He was, without question, serious about his politics, but he preferred to keep the expression of his seriousness largely private and in a minor key. “I generally do the first day of the Aldermaston march”, he informed Robert Lowell in 1962, “as it is through nice country with a few spectators, and the Anglican parson of a parish along the route has been tending to crack up under it.” Empson genuinely wanted to ban the bomb, but it pleased him to give the impression that it was the chance to tread on the toes of a parson that really made him put his walking boots on.
The letters included here certainly enrich our sense of the relation between these particular political commitments and his broader cultural loyalties. To begin with, the mathematically trained Empson had a feel for the achievements of science that may not have been exceptional in interwar Cambridge, but which has since been unusual among literary critics. As he wrote to one correspondent in 1947, referring to the discoveries of Einstein and Eddington:
A critic who cuts himself off from the only fertile part of the contemporary mind is I think unlikely to understand what good work feels like when it is new, and as far as my own work is concerned anyway I am sure I have always found the worldview of the scientists much more stimulating and usable than that of any “literary influence”.
In his letters he can be unbuttoned about the partisan implications of such sympathies. In the mid-1960s, he declared: “I think that the Enlightenment is the only hope for civilization, and that the crawling insinuations against it mainly introduced by T. S. Eliot poison our whole intellectual life”. And in his public response to Roger Sale, published in the Hudson Review in 1967, he pronounced:
The Whig Interpretation of History is the correct one, and it is remarkable that the book given that title offers no single reason to think otherwise, being merely a fashion report of some High Table giggles. Anything I print about the past, ignorant as I know myself to be, is intended as real truth about the past which I think worth fighting over.
This is not, I think, just a smack at Butterfield: Empson retained a wider optimism than was fashionable among the literary elite of the day that science, secularism, liberty and the social-democratic state were advancing on a common front. As he insisted in 1973, against any interpretation that would assimilate him to literary-critical fashions he had never shared: “I don’t believe, and never have believed, that a social and literary ‘dissociation of sensibility’ ever occurred; I don’t even believe that everything is getting worse”. With that knack he displayed in his later letters for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, at least as far as persuasion of the uncommitted was concerned, he went on: “Evidently the split is believed to have occurred soon after the Reformation so the belief is best explained as R. C. propaganda”.
In general, though, his sturdy liberal convictions made him a telling critic of all forms of cultural pessimism. For example, in a letter from the mid-1960s he characterized the American critic Allen Tate as a follower of the Eliot fashion,
and the fashion seems to me a nasty one, which I hope will soon die. It expresses contempt for the modern world on aesthetic grounds, explaining that the speaker would have been a cultured aristocrat in earlier times . . . . A young man with the generosity of mind which comes from energy, and feeling a power to join in, would not despise the actual triumphs of the human mind and spirit which he found bursting out all around him. Surely it is time a generation grew up which isn’t all the time crying “Boo-hoo, I can’t afford to keep a butler any longer”.
Empson never lost the class confidence which was second nature to a bohemian Wykehamist of gentry stock, but perhaps that made it easier for him to see through the social fantasies which partly fuelled such cultural pessimism. Though “the generosity of mind which comes from energy” may have declined in him a little as years went by, he never wavered in the democratic conviction that things were, on balance, getting better for most people and that that was what mattered.
One thing, in his view, all too obviously not getting better was the study and teaching of English literature in Britain and the United States, and from the 1950s onwards his correspondence takes constant pot-shots at what he saw as its over-professionalized and over-methodized fatuities. Much of his spleen is directed against the “anti-intentionalist” doctrine of the second-generation New Critics, an orthodoxy that attempted to deny the legitimacy in literary interpretation of “a process which all persons not insane are using in all their social experience”. The institutionalized divorce between the study of literature and all the other activities of human life was at the root of the problem. As he remarked after taking part in the Kenyon College summer school, one of the temples of the New Criticism in the 1950s, “we are as concentrated on our profession as a conference of dentists practically”. There are occasional signs of confidence about the future of literary criticism – “with periodic sanitary efforts it can probably be got to continue in a sturdy, placid way, as is needed” – and several of the letters show him wielding the scrubbing brush to some purpose. But at other moments the excess of his tirades against “the greasy lies” and “fetid marshgas” seems grumpily counter-productive. In his reply to Roger Sale cited earlier, he did at least acknowledge that Sale had praised him “for what I would most hope to be praised for, that is, for being large-minded and resisting the sordidity of modern Eng Lit”.
Appropriately, one of the last letters included here is to Haffenden himself who, in 1982, was proposing to write Empson’s biography (a reminder of how many years he has devoted to his task). Perhaps surprisingly, the potential subject was encouraging, even keen: “If you show that my work takes a coherent position, and is not just a series of pointless cooked-up shocks, you will be doing me a great service”. But the more predictable, deprecating impulses soon kick in. He fears, from the synopsis Haffenden has sent, that “my colleagues would find the account too saintly and inflated”. “Total consistency is a good deal to say of anyone, and my public life has consisted mainly of getting comfortable seats to observe the great events of our time”. This, as Haffenden’s first volume has already made clear, considerably understates the privations Empson endured in the 1930s, above all in China during the Japanese invasion; and the full account of his war years in London and of his adventures in Peking during the Communist regime is yet to come. But the remark indirectly underlies the point about his not having much of a “public role” in the sense that, say, Eliot or Leavis, or even Raymond Williams or Richard Hoggart, did as literary critics who were also social critics.
In textbook surveys, Empson still tends to figure as the star performer of the whizz-bang school of criticism, the verbal fireworks of what, after Richards, was termed “Practical Criticism” in Britain, with the “New Criticism” as its close American relative. Empson displayed immense virtuosity in minute close reading, especially in Seven Types Of Ambiguity (published when he was twenty-four), but his critical practice more generally went far beyond such techniques and was governed by his sturdy hold on human fundamentals and his relentless drive for clarity, even when dealing with the most delicate literary effects. This selection of his letters amplifies and illustrates the ways in which he maintained a steady focus on “sense”: his claims about the “plain sense” of a disputed passage often rested on attributions of “a good sense” to the author and on invocations of “common sense” among readers. In clumsier hands, such moves can be just a kind of philistinism, a bluff refusal to reconsider premisses or to acknowledge irreconcilable points of view. There was perhaps a dash of this in Empson’s later years as he became increasingly exasperated by the various methodological fashions in literary studies, but in his early and middle decades these emphases expressed an uncowed acknowledgement of the relation of language to ordinary (and extraordinary) social experience. Once the critic lost a hold on this, Empson believed, he became (as he said of the over-professionalized analytical philosopher), “an almost insanely specialized type of acrobat”.
A further reason Empson so hated the various moralizing and politicizing orthodoxies that dominated academic Eng Lit in his later years was because they encouraged in students “a craving to scold”. Empson had admirably little of this urge. Controverting factual or intellectual error was one thing: there was a lot of it about and, as we have seen, he rather enjoyed laying about him with the Sword of Truth. But he displays very little desire to judge people or try to make them like himself, or like any one model. As he wrote to his methodologically over-zealous graduate student, Philip Hobsbaum, in 1966, “It seems to me that the chief function of imaginative literature is to make you realise that other people are very various, many of them quite different from you, with different ‘systems of value’ as well; and the effect of almost any Orthodoxy is to hide this, and pretend that everybody ought to be like Homer or Dr Leavis”. Dealing with Empson himself evidently called for no little tolerance from others, partly because of the occasional fallout from his taste for copious drink, domestic squalor and a rather unconventional style of fulfilling his professional duties. But he in his turn seems to have been profoundly, instinctively tolerant where different ways of life were concerned. What he hated was cant and hypocrisy, and daft intellectual systems that had lost touch with the reality of human experience, that “vast façade of imbecility” that, in his view, protected so much academic writing from saying anything important. Thus, even when he fails to persuade, he still retains, as these letters vividly remind us, a wonderful, unnerving power to take the wind out of professorial sails.
For one of the great things about Empson is that he remained open to the magnificence of the world while being properly severe on the idiot things said about it by people in the grip of some schoolroom crotchet. “It is petulant snootiness to say ‘The world is not good enough for me’, the world is glorious beyond all telling and far too good for any of us.” And he can put us in our places in more local ways, too. “Congratulations on your splendid piece in the TLS”, he wrote to Ricks in the late 1970s, about an essay on Geoffrey Hill, adding his trademark bang at the end, “the dismal old paper does not deserve it.”
